As the tech literacy of the population increases, acceptance of crypto as a legitimate store of value follows, and it boomed. Titles along the lines of ‘Bitcoin price hits new all-time high’ and ‘Ethereum price surges’ are starting to perforate the general public’s news feed. What we know for sure is that people who were once skeptical of Bitcoin and the technology behind it are slowly understanding and getting increasingly involved with crypto. As at the time of writing, the market cap of the entire crypto space is at 30.9 billion USD. It was 20 billion just four months ago. What would it be four months from now?
Gold holds its value well because we trust that we will all collectively continue to trust it as a store of value forever, predominantly due to its scarcity and lack of centralized control. Fiat currencies hold their value well when they do because people trust that everyone else trusts the currency as well, and that it is deserving of trust. The moment that collective trust collapses, so too does the currency, no matter what its intrinsic ‘tangible’ value.
For investors interested in diversifying into this space I recommend a simple strategy. First, invest only what you are willing to lose. For most this is <1% of their portfolio. Second, spend a massive amount of time understanding the space and the particular asset you are buying before making the purchase. We don’t recommend trading in and out of these assets, so it’s best if you have a strong thesis that can govern your investment decisions. This will not only help accelerate the learning process but will help create a healthier market with a better informed investor base.
NEW YORK, April 2, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Grayscale Investments, LLC, in its role as agent (the "Agent") of the shareholders of record as of January 8, 2018 (the "Record Date Shareholders") of Bitcoin Investment Trust (OTCQX: GBTC) (the "Trust"), announced today that, on behalf of the Record Date Shareholders, it has irrevocably abandoned all of the rights to Bitcoin Segwit2X tokens distributed to the Record Date Shareholders on January 8, 2018.
Futures are financial contracts obligating the buyer to purchase an asset or the seller to sell an asset, such as a physical commodity or a financial instrument, at a predetermined future date and price. Futures contracts detail the quality and quantity of the underlying asset; they are standardized to facilitate trading on a futures exchange. Some futures contracts may call for physical delivery of the asset, while others are settled in cash.
When signing up on these exchanges for the first time, do make it a point to verify your account with the required documents early, as you do not want to be caught in the middle of some tedious and slow admin work when the trading opportunity comes. Verification on these exchanges may take days, and purchase/withdraw limits may only increase gradually as you trade.
Bitcoin Investment Trust, Bitcoin Cash Investment Trust, Ethereum Investment Trust, Ethereum Classic Investment Trust, Litecoin Investment Trust, XRP Investment Trust, Zcash Investment Trust and Zen Investment Trust are passive investment vehicles and their shares may be adversely affected by losses that, had they been actively managed, might have been avoidable. Grayscale Digital Large Cap Fund LLC is actively managed using proprietary investment strategies and processes. There can be no guarantee that these strategies and processes will produce the intended results and no guarantee that the fund will achieve its investment objective. This could result in the fund’s underperformance compared to other funds with similar investment objectives.
To the other point, gold’s coveted status in jewelry is merely a derivative property of its perceived value, which leads to its designation as a status symbol. Without that underlying perceived value, it would command far less value in jewelry. Consequently, the question still remains about the gap between the industrial and medical value of gold and the actual value of gold as determined by the market. Where does the value in that gap come from?
The same might be said of speculative investments such as those in cryptocurrency. You can and absolutely should do your part to learn as much as possible about this field, and come to your own personal conclusions on its current and future potential value. However, no matter how much research you do and how many calculations you make, there will always be a fundamental and inextricable degree of pure luck involved in determining the ultimate outcome of your speculation. Any number of future events could tip the scales for or against cryptocurrency, or more specifically, any one cryptocurrency, and a number of these will be ‘black swan’ events that are fundamentally unpredictable in their nature and timing, but in aggregate whole, almost certain to occur.
Generally, the strategy suggested to average out such short term volatility for something that one is investing in long term is to practice dollar cost averaging. This preaches that one should set an exact time at regular time intervals to buy an exact amount in fiat currency of the investment one is looking to purchase — e.g., $1,000 worth of bitcoin on the 1st of every week, or every month. This means that over time, you’ll be able to take advantage of bitcoin’s general trajectory upwards, but balance out the relative short term volatile price movements both high and low, such that you experience a more linear growth trajectory over time of your principal.
FunFair (https://www.funfair.io/) is a decentralised gaming platform, and it is advertised as “The world’s fastest Ethereum casino platform.” Thanks to their breakthrough technology, FUN tokens will be used as chips inside the casino. This is the first platform that solves many big challenges other blockchain casinos have. They have a working proof of concept (POC). They are working hard at finishing the development, so we should expect to see a raise in the token’s value once FunFair officially opens.
With cryptocurrency projects, you are mainly investing in young startups. The sobering statistic is that 90% of all startups fail. We see no reason why the failure rate of cryptocurrency projects should be any lower in the long term. That’s right; if you invest in 10 random cryptocurrency projects, on average you ought to expect 9 of them to eventually be worth nothing.
Almost every crypto-list today starts off with the king – Bitcoin! Satoshi Nakamoto created Bitcoin a long time ago, and it was the first cryptocurrency to step blinking into the bright light of the world! Bitcoin has surpassed all expecatations and continues to grow in value and popularity – despite recent setbacks and a lot of FUD from trolls and haters (read: traditional banks) online. Will Bitcoin continue to increase in value in 2018? Recent trends say: Yes! In my opinion, any cryptocurrency portfolio should hold some Bitcoin.
This portfolio gives us diversified exposure to more exotic cryptocurrency projects with higher risk / reward profiles, whilst holding the majority of our funds in a core large cap position. In a down market, we would expect this portfolio to perform worse than our conservative one. However, we expect a superior performance if the cryptocurrency market goes on a bull run.
I hope that this elucidation provides some insight into why I personally see it as suspect to invest in something based on price alone, and why I urge extreme caution particularly if one is exploring whether or not to invest in an altcoin, especially if one is at least partially motivated to do so because of the feeling that the ship has already sailed for bitcoin, and that there might be better potential for outsized gains with a smaller altcoin. Again, this certainly may be true, and often is true even for altcoins destined for eventual failure in the short term while a bubble/bull market continues, but risks are amplified just as much as the opportunity itself when it comes to altcoins, and oftentimes moreso in a bubble than otherwise.
Again, while this all seems incredibly far-fetched today for most people (but not all, as the present day European migrant crisis has made abundantly clear), it happens much more often than one might expect. A little remembered fact is that the United States itself once outlawed the possession of gold, back in 1933 with Executive Order 6102, and forced all its citizens to relinquish all gold to the United States at a fixed price of $20.67 per troy ounce.
“As we approach the anniversary of futures trading, we expect more institutional investors to make big moves with crypto dedicated funds. One recent example of this was the recent announcement of A16Z, a $300 million crypto fund launched by Andreessen Horowitz dedicated to investing in cryptocurrencies and other blockchain-related projects,” – notes Kulkarni.

Returning to the question of calculating potential investment upside here, there are countless other ways to make projections on the future potential value of bitcoin, and I encourage you to try to make some depending on your personal beliefs regarding the level of success bitcoin might have, and the ultimate utility it might provide to the world. For instance, if you see bitcoin primarily as a way to simplify making international transactions and cut out inefficiencies there, you might look to see what the overall market size is for a solution that might solve that problem and capture that market. Western Union, as one example, is a company with a market cap of $9 billion. Consequently, it might be reasonable to expect that bitcoin’s true ultimate value would be something roughly in that order of magnitude, if this were to be bitcoin’s one true long term use case.

Decide on a profit-taking strategy. When will you take profits? And how much will you sell? I’ve divided my holdings into low risk (Bitcoin), medium risk (platform), and high risk (utility). For every category, you decide on a profit/sell schedule. This can be: when a high-risk investment rises 20%, you sell 5%, or if you want to take more risk, when it rises 50% you sell 10%. Be realistic and commit yourself to your created schedule.
My suggestion is to carefully select five tokens which work on different technologies like multi-chain, scaling, privacy, storage, and DAG. Learn them and hold them. Follow the projects actively on their social channels, get involved and contribute in any way you can. Collect bounties if they are available to increase your position. This way you are protecting your investment, something you can almost never do with traditional investments.

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